Russell Roberts's Blog, page 154
April 7, 2022
Some Covid Links
Yu Ying Charter School, a Chinese-English dual language charter, is waiting until April 25 to end the mask mandate. Yu Ying was also enforcing a travel quarantine as recently as last week: Unvaccinated students—a category which includes virtually all the pre-K students—and their immediate family members are forbidden from leaving the D.C.-Maryland-Virginia area. If they do leave, they must abide by a 7–10 day quarantine period.
The fact that these policies are far stricter than what the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommend is not lost on families with kids in these schools.
“Parents are not really allowed in the building for any reason,” says Paul Fraioli, a parent. “Up until a month ago, they wanted to have the objects people touched sanitized.”
The scientific literature in support of masks is remarkably similar to the scientific literature in support of hydroxychloroquine. Both are dominated by poorly designed low-quality studies. Those studies tend to rely heavily on anecdotes and cherrypicked case analyses that just happen to conveniently coincide with periods of time that show trends moving in the way that the proponents of each wish for them to move (while also often omitting periods that show the opposite).
The main difference: the hydroxychlorquine studies are usually dismissed out of hand over the weakness of their evidence by the very same public health authorities and media personalities who use equally bad or worse pro-mask studies to shut down any criticism of mask policies.
Writing at Spiked, Ella Whelan explains that “school closures were a terrible mistake.” A slice:
And it became clear that school closures had less to do with protecting pupils’ health and more to do with political posturing. After all, we learned fairly early on that Covid posed very little risk to children – and it was clear that shutting schools was harming them. But that didn’t stop some educators and politicians calling for school closures almost continuously for two years.
Debbie Lerman pleads for an end to the demonization of the unvaccinated. A slice:
We now know a lot more about the vaccines and about acquired immunity. Most importantly, we know that while vaccines give good but waning protection from bad outcomes, they do not prevent a person from getting a Covid infection or transmitting the virus to another person. We also know that having had Covid gives you at least as much protection from bad outcomes as the vaccine does.
This is crucial information that must be incorporated into how we view vaccines and how we view each other.
Unfortunately, when I talk to my friends who have been in a so-called “liberal” bubble for the past two years, they are shocked to hear that an unvaccinated person poses as much, or as little, risk to others as we – the triple vaxxed! – do. They just have this feeling that someone who’s unvaccinated is dangerous to them, or to society, in some way.
I understand where their fear and misunderstanding come from. First, of course, is the ocean of hysteria and misinformation they’ve been swimming in for the past two years. Second is the original (and in some places ongoing) vaccine campaign that emphasizes the importance of protecting not just oneself but others. Third is the experience we’ve had with other vaccines that have been able to eradicate or at least very radically reduce the prevalence of serious diseases like polio.
Given all that baggage, I’m finding it very hard to change people’s minds. Yet I persist.
Other than a simple pursuit of scientific data and truth, I believe it’s crucial to disabuse my friends and neighbors of the unfounded biases they harbor against “the unvaccinated” because that is turning into a label used to unnecessarily and unjustly marginalize a whole group of people. Like “the untouchables” or “the undocumented” this type of label contains a pejorative assumption about the members of the group that, in turn, justifies negative treatment of them.
In my world of the liberal coastal elites, the negative treatment of “the unvaccinated” manifests itself mostly in unjust exclusion from the places I used to view as the most inclusive, enlightened and welcoming: performing arts venues, community arts organizations, colleges and universities.
Unsurprisingly, many government executive officials resist efforts to rein in their abilities to declare, extend, and exercise emergency powers. (HT W.E. Heasley) A slice:
Ruling by decree over an extended period during the pandemic “is part of a broader move to condense power to the executive branch,” said Nick Murray, policy analyst at the conservative Maine Policy Institute, who has studied emergency policies. “You see these things come into play during a crisis and then [remain in place] to give more executive power,” Murray said. “It’s a theme that has devolved into bureaucracy.”
This German gentleman is an entrepreneur of sorts, but one terribly reckless with his own well-being.
Listen and learn from experts, but never follow them blindly.
Cindy Yu reports on “China’s zero Covid crack-up.” A slice:
‘We’re being driven mad. Nobody is listening to us. They’ve politicised this disease.’ This week, the candid remarks of Zhu Weiping, a senior official at Shanghai’s Centre for Disease Control (CDC), have gone viral in China. Her phone call with a frustrated local was recorded, and her despair resonated with people in the city and the rest of the country who are at their wit’s end with the zero-Covid policy. Shanghai is buckling: the Covid chaos there is the worst China has seen since Wuhan in 2020.
In the last two years, China’s zero-Covid policy has demonstrated the determination and effectiveness of the one-party state. Millions of people can be tested en masse. Positive cases are dragged into state quarantine. New arrivals undergo a marathon isolation period (my mother is on Day 19, having returned to Shanghai last month). But cases and deaths have been kept low. Brutal and strict it might be; the one thing zero Covid hasn’t been is chaotic. That’s all changing now.
Why? Because China’s measures to contain Covid were never designed to deal with a variant as infectious as Omicron. The daily case rate in Shanghai has tripled in a week (17,077 on Tuesday, compared to 5,982 seven days earlier). Every day, the city’s authorities are arranging the Covid-secure transportation of thousands of positive cases (and their contacts) into quarantine centres where they are supposed to serve out their isolation as a group sealed off from the world. Hospitals, gyms, apartment blocks and Shanghai’s World Expo Centre (in another era, a symbol of China’s openness rather than plague) have all been converted into quarantine centres.
Conditions can be appalling. One viral video showed a group of those locked up complaining about the dirtiness of the communal toilets at the Shanghai Expo, the lack of food, medicine and tests. Children have been split up from parents to quarantine separately. People have been spending the night in coaches that are meant to take them to quarantine centres.
Those able to stay at home have an easier time, but many remain confused and panicked. Food is a worry: most are not allowed to leave their homes to shop and online shopping has become competitive. The emergency services are exhausted and prioritise Covid cases, leading to a tragic handful of instances where those with critical illnesses have died at home instead of being seen in time.
Dr Aseem Malhotra tweets about China’s deranged and tyrannical policy of zero Covid: (HT Jay Bhattacharya)
It’s because of gross fear mongering that has resulted in a virus being treated like Ebola when nothing could be further from the truth. Health and statistical illiteracy is at the very root of the problem
Alice Su tweets: (HT Dan Klein)
As seen on Weibo: Shanghai residents go to their balconies to sing & protest lack of supplies. A drone appears: “Please comply w covid restrictions. Control your soul’s desire for freedom. Do not open the window or sing.” https://m.weibo.cn/status/4755028135383701…
(DBx: I’ve run out of words to express the sheer anger, dismay, and disbelief that I experience whenever I encounter a mix such as this of Covid derangement and authoritarianism. Much of the world has gone mad, and appears intent on remaining so.)
Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 395 of Will Durant’s 1944 volume, Caesar and Christ:
Law tends to lag behind moral development, not because law cannot learn, but because experience has shown the wisdom of testing new ways in practice before congealing them into law.
DBx: Durant here wrote, not of legislation, but of genuine law – that is, of law that emerges through practice and experience, is embodied in custom, and comes to be discovered, articulated, and enforced by courts. One of the many problems with legislation, as distinct from law, is that legislation is often rushed – it is often enacted in reaction to current events – without the legislators having sufficiently considered the likely full consequences of their consciously created edicts.
Legislators typically underestimate the complexity of the social systems into which they thrust their edicts.
April 6, 2022
Capital Is Not Fixed In Amount
On-going correspondence with a trade skeptic:
Mr. W__:
Disagreeing with my explanation of why high-wage American workers have nothing to fear from an American policy of free trade with low-wage countries, you write: “High US worker productivity comes from companies investing plenty of capital for workers to work with. But under free trade companies would move investments to countries with lower wages. US workers will become less productive and be paid lower wages. This is why the combination of free trade and capital mobility are bad for workers in rich nations.”
Wrong.
While you’re correct that the productivity of American workers is raised in no small part by significant private-sector investment in the U.S. – that is, by the creation and use in the U.S. of capital goods and services that improve worker productivity – for a variety of reasons you’re incorrect to conclude that American workers would suffer under free trade. Here are two of those reasons.
First, worker productivity in the U.S. isn’t kept high exclusively by investments here in capital goods and services. Also raising American workers’ productivity is the extensiveness and quality of our transportation and communications infrastructure, the relative honesty and efficiency of our legal system, and the still-dominance here of what Deirdre McCloskey calls “bourgeois virtues,” especially our culture of commerce, hard work, and high trust. Making trade freer would do nothing to worsen America’s performance on these fronts; indeed, I believe that this performance would be further improved.
Second, the amount of capital in the world isn’t fixed. It expands or shrinks with the bettering or worsening of investment climates in different countries across the globe.
There’s a reason why low-wage countries have in place less capital per worker than is in place in the U.S., that reason being that investing in those countries is less attractive than is investing in the U.S. And the attractiveness of investing in those countries is unlikely to improve greatly merely as a result of the U.S. lowering its trade barriers. But if the investment climate in low-wage countries improves in a way to attract to those countries substantially more investment, as long as government in the U.S. does nothing to worsen the investment climate here – say, by raising taxes exorbitantly – the stock of capital in America will not fall. Instead, the global stock of capital will rise as new capital is created for low-wage countries. Workers in low-wage countries will thus become more productive with no decline in the productivity of American workers.
Also keep in mind this fact: No small part of the high productivity of American workers is due directly to international trade. This trade not only makes available to many American workers low-cost, high-quality raw materials, tools, and inputs to work with, but also offers to many American companies vast foreign markets that enable these companies to operate at large, highly productive scales.
But in the end, all of the above is unnecessarily complex. The simple fact is this: A people are not made richer when their government obstructs their access to low-priced goods and services. They’re made poorer. Period.
Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux
Professor of Economics
and
Martha and Nelson Getchell Chair for the Study of Free Market Capitalism at the Mercatus Center
George Mason University
Fairfax, VA 22030
In Markets, High-Wage Workers ≡ High-Productivity Workers
There’s a key to escaping the confusion that traps people who worry that Americans’ high real wages prevent us Americans from trading profitably over the long haul with people in poorer countries. The key is to ask why are Americans’ wages higher than are wages in poorer countries?
The answer has two parts. The first is that American workers are especially highly productive in the particular jobs at which they work. The second part is that American workers would be nearly as highly productive in the alternative jobs at which these workers would otherwise work.
Consider, for example, a pharmaceutical scientist working in the US for Merck and earning an annual salary of $100,000. We can be sure that the annual value received by Merck from employing this worker – the annual value of what this worker produces – is at least $100,000. We can be confident also that the value of the annual output this worker would produce were he or she to work elsewhere is not a great deal lower than $100,000, for otherwise Merck, greedy Big Pharma operation that it is, would have bid this worker away from his or her alternative employment by offering an annual salary of less than $100,000.
In short, American workers’ unusually high wages reflect American workers’ unusually high productivity. And unusually high productivity is hardly an economic disadvantage. Yet when politicians and pundits worry that American workers under a policy of free trade are destined, because of their high wages, to be driven into much lower-wage occupations by imports produced by lower-wage foreigners, what these politicians and pundits are really worrying about is that American workers are somehow at a disadvantage because they are unusually productive compared to foreign workers. But when described in this manner, this worry is revealed to be the nonsense that it in fact is.
Everyone instinctively understands this truth at his or her personal level. Professional basketball superstar LeBron James doesn’t worry that his very high pay will leave him unemployed as the Los Angeles Lakers hire off of the street a middle-aged dude who’d be thrilled to replace James at a minuscule fraction of James’s current salary. Likewise, the tax accountant who lives across town from you, and your sister-in-law who is paid handsomely to manage the local Target store, don’t worry that they’ll lose their jobs to teenagers earning the minimum wage.
For the same reason American workers who produce what economists call “tradable goods” – goods of the sort commonly imported and exported – are, despite being paid wages higher than many foreign workers, generally at little risk of losing their jobs to these foreign workers.
I qualify my conclusion with the word “generally” because every worker is at some risk of losing his or her current job to a change in economic circumstances – a change in consumer tastes or improvements in techniques of production and distribution. Such change is an unavoidable feature of any economy in which the masses enjoy a reasonable expectation of a high and rising standard of living. But the following fact remains: In a market economy, high wages are a result of – and a reflection of – high productivity. And so contrary to widespread fears of many protectionists, high-productivity workers have nothing to fear from competition with low-productivity workers.
Some Covid Links
Aaron Kheriaty decries the Covid era’s dystopianism. A slice:
Lockdowns were never part of conventional public health measures. In 1968, 1-4 million people died in the H2N3 influenza pandemic; businesses and schools never closed, and large events were not cancelled. One thing we never did until 2020 was lockdown entire populations. And we did not do this because it does not work. In 2020 we had no empirical evidence that it would work, only flawed mathematical models whose predications were not just slightly off, but wildly off by several orders of magnitude.
These devastating economic consequences were not the only major societal shifts ushered in by lockdowns. Our ruling class saw in Covid an opportunity to radically revolutionize society: recall how the phrase “the new normal” emerged almost immediately in the first weeks of the pandemic. In the first month Anthony Fauci made the absurd suggestion that perhaps never again would we go back to shaking hands. Never again?
What emerged during lockdowns was not just a novel and untested method of trying to control a pandemic by quarantining healthy people. If we view lockdowns outside of the immediate context in which they supposedly functioned in early 2020, their real meaning comes into focus.
Changes ushered during lockdowns were signs of a broader social and political experiment “in which a new paradigm of governance over people and things is at play,” as described by Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben. This new paradigm began to emerge in the wake of September 11, 2001.
Dr. Joel Zinberg, writing in the New York Post, is rightly critical of New York City mayor Eric Adams’s decision to keep very young NYC schoolchildren masked. Here’s his conclusion:
Even if community risk was rising, there is little evidence that masking students works. Sweden, which kept schools open without mask mandates, found that teachers had no increased risk of severe COVID-19 infection compared to other occupations. Staff-to-staff transmission between adults is far more common than transmission from students.
Mayor Adams has shown courage in ending many pandemic restrictions. He would be well advised to follow the science, not his overcautious health commissioner, and end all school mask mandates.
“The CDC finds a depression epidemic among teens — that it created.” A slice:
A new Centers for Disease Control study reveals how badly teens have suffered from COVID policies — that the CDC itself pushed.
Many of us have lamented the terrible damage done to younger children by school closures and mask mandates — years of learning loss that may never be made up. Now we learn that the isolation and anxiety that accompanied school shutdowns have taken a heavy toll on adolescents.
The CDC found that more than a third of US high-school students reported poor mental health during the pandemic. Nearly half — 44% — said they felt sad or hopeless. A horrifying near-20% said they had seriously considered suicide in the previous 12 months.
You have to laugh, although this is not really a laughing matter. Not when the new “symptoms” – which sound remarkably like the condition formerly known as “a bit of a cold” – are basically an open invitation to call in sick. Not when the NHS seriously appears to be suggesting that people with a blocked nose or a headache should “stay home and avoid contact”. Most especially not when Covid-related absences are still causing havoc in essential services such as schools, hospitals and airlines.
I can’t be the only one who finds it startling that, on March 31, 120,000 pupils were off school with confirmed cases of Covid, even though nearly all of those kids must have had Covid at least once by now and many will have no symptoms whatsoever. (Perhaps the teenage habit of taking a screenshot of a positive test and reusing it several times is a factor?) On the same date, 46,000 teachers and 53,000 teaching assistants were off sick with the virus. Who knows, maybe adults also make sly use of screenshots of a positive test?
Shanghai sounds hellish. Three slices:
China’s strict zero-Covid strategy has brought chaotic scenes to Shanghai, with patients fighting for food and water after being taken to makeshift quarantine centres as authorities on Tuesday extended a lockdown to cover all 26 million residents.
Shanghai is China’s largest city to be locked down to date and the extension of restrictions amid surging cases presents a major test for the country’s approach to the virus.
Video shared on social media showed dozens scrapping for basic supplies after they were transferred to a quarantine facility in an abandoned school in a southeastern suburb.
…..
The broader lockdown came after testing saw asymptomatic cases surge to more than 13,000. Symptomatic cases fell on Monday to 268, from 425 the previous day.
The city’s normally choked roads were all but empty on Tuesday but authorities showed no sign of wavering.
…..
Some 23 Chinese cities are under total or partial lockdown, affecting an estimated 193 million people.
(DBx: Note that 13,000 is 0.05 percent of Shanghai’s population; 425 is 0.0016 percent. Covid Derangement Syndrome is both real and fuel for terrible authoritarianism.)
The open support for big tech censorship by prominent lockdown supporters is something else. They apparently believe that the definition of misinformation is any idea held by somebody else. They are the most illiberal group of people I’ve ever encountered…
Quotation of the Day…
… is from pages 59-60 of my colleague Peter Boettke’s 2017 Presidential address – “Economics and Public Administration” – to the Southern Economic Association, as this address is reprinted in Pete’s 2021 book, The Struggle for a Better World:
Economics is a science of complex phenomena, yet the modern administrative state demanded an economics of simple phenomena to accomplish the policy tasks so conceived. The problem is that such an approach must confront the strange situation that the approaches that superficially look the most scientific to outside observers are often in reality the least scientific, while the approaches that superficially look the least scientific are actually the most scientific because they understand the limits to our knowledge in the science of complex phenomena.
DBx: Equations appear sophisticated even when they are merely sophistical. Ditto for regression analyses and other econometric exercises, regardless of how many differences in differences are detected. That there are legitimate uses in economics for such tools is undeniable. But also undeniable is this fact: No analytical tools will ever, regardless of how impressively complicated they appear, give to any human being – or to any committee or congress of human beings – even a tiny fraction of the knowledge of complex reality that would have to be known for this human being (or group of human beings) to outperform decentralized private-property markets at the task of allocating resources to uses most advantageous to humanity.
April 5, 2022
Some Non-Covid Links
The modern progressives who dominate the Biden administration have labeled themselves Neo-Brandeisians after Justice Louis Brandeis, who claimed that “the evils of excessive bigness are something distinct from and additional to the evils of monopoly.” Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who believes that only government should be big and powerful, has worked to ensure that committed progressives hold key levers of regulatory power in the Biden administration. Notable examples include Tim Wu, a special assistant to the White House National Economic Council; Lina Khan, chairman of the Federal Trade Commission; and Rohit Chopra, director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
These officials see the world through the lens of class warfare, as a zero-sum game. Like Progressives before them, they view the rule of law not as a cornerstone of liberty and democracy, but as an impediment to equality and the means by which the ruling class suppresses the masses. In their view, economics-based antitrust enforcement under the consumer-welfare standard drives this oppression. Sandeep Vaheesan of the Open Markets Institute, who has written academic papers with Ms. Khan, claims that an “antitrust enforcer anchored in consumer welfare is an antitrust enforcer anchored in anti-labor.”
While antitrust enforcement since the 1970s has sought to rise above politics by using economics-based analysis to measure consumer benefit, modern progressives reject the idea that antitrust enforcement is, and should be, apolitical. To them, economics isn’t a value-neutral discipline that guides sound decision-making. Matthew Stoller, who worked with Ms. Khan at the Open Markets Institute, believes “the point of economics as a discipline is to create a language and methodology for governing that hides political assumptions from the public.” To Ms. Khan, “all decisions are political insofar as government agencies are bringing them.”
…..
With the consumer-welfare standard uprooted, antitrust would become a license to control the American economy, capriciously rewarding favored businesses and punishing disfavored ones. The president has appointed regulators who are openly hostile to those they regulate and to the economic system of the country. A goal of Republicans in the upcoming antitrust debate should be to codify the consumer-welfare standard. It would be a tragic irony if Republican hostility to Big Tech for its leftist political leaning and censorship empowered the Biden administration to exert even greater control over the American economy.
Ed Gresser calls for an end to shoe protectionism in America. A slice:
Second, shoe tariffs are especially biased against the poor. A lawyer in dress leathers unwittingly pays an 8.5% tariff and a college student in elite running shoes pays 20%, but a maid in a cheap pair of sneakers imported for $3 or less pays an extraordinary 48%. This is the highest ad valorem tariff rate imposed on a manufactured good, nearly double the highest Trump tariff.
Third, they are an international outlier. No major economy taxes cheap shoes as heavily as the U.S.
Fourth, shoe tariffs are almost entirely ineffective as job or production protectors, given that the 1.9 billion pairs that were imported in 2021 account for 98% of American shoe purchases. This last fact makes the shoe tariff a scandal that, in theory, is easy to solve.
In this 2022 tax season, as policy makers look for ways to cool off consumer prices in an inflationary environment and make the tax code friendlier to the working poor, eliminating tariffs on imported shoes would be an obvious win.
Arnold Kling has wise advice for economics majors. Two slices:
If you are an economics major, then you have already taken too many economics courses for your lifetime. Stop taking econ, and think in terms of alternatives to going for an advanced degree.
You already have been exposed to all of the important principles in economics. Applying those principles, you should appreciate that the marginal value of another economics course is low relative to its opportunity cost.
…..
For your career, I am telling you not to do what I did. I obtained a Ph.D in economics. After I graduated college in 1975, I was a research assistant at the Congressional Budget Office and then at the Fed. The Fed was strongly credentialist, as are most government agencies. So I knew that without a Ph.D my ceiling there was below the floor I could have with a doctorate.
For actually understanding the economy, it is hard to think of any course I took in graduate school that had value. I learned a lot of mathematical models, some of which were wrong and all of which were useless. My knowledge of economics has increased over time, but from general reading, not from graduate school.
Richard Rahn likes Mark Skousen’s book The Making of Modern Economics.
My GMU Econ colleague Dan Klein shares some quotations from C.S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man.
Here’s Liz Wolfe on Bernie Sanders on American ‘oligarchs’ (so called).
Richard Williams is right: “The IRS doesn’t need more workers, it needs less work.”
Alexander Riley debunks the asinine and absurd Robin DiAngelo. (HT George Leef) A slice:
Robin DiAngelo has suddenly gotten very well-known and much wealthier because of her tapping by cultural and educational elites as one of the “experts” on white racism and concomitant non-white suffering. The university at which I am employed lists her “groundbreaking” book White Fragility on its page of antiracism resources. All of us, we are told, would do well to consult her writings or, better still, to hire her to come preach to us face-to-face on our college campus. Her knowledge does not come cheap. An hour-long keynote address will run you in the vicinity of $30,000, a half-day antiracist retreat upward of $40,000.
I have not had the opportunity to attend one of these enlightening events, but I did indeed find it instructional to go through a brief video DiAngelo did for NBC News in which she succinctly “debunk[s] the most common myths white people believe about race.” What I discovered is that the real mythology has more to do with the questionable and often straightforwardly untrue things DiAngelo believes than about what she imagines “white people” do.
Pierre Lemieux reviews the new edition of Hayek’s Law, Legislation, and Liberty.
Some Covid Links
Jordan Schachtel is rightly critical of the gargantuan straw man now brutalizing Shanghai. A slice:
When does this end, and what will be the global reaction to China’s COVID measures?
Hopefully nothing. Thankfully, at least some areas of the world, particularly the free regions of America, have become wise to the pseudoscience behind the lockdowns and other “tools” purportedly designed to stop people from getting sick. However, much of the world remains propagandized into potentially accepting another round of COVID tyranny.
China used its early 2020 lockdown as a political weapon to showcase its apparent political superiority, and the CCP persuaded the West to adopt similar policies that resulted in economic and humanitarian disaster.
The Wuhan lockdown lasted only a handful of weeks, but its declared “success” in defeating COVID convinced the vast majority of the world to attempt to replicate the severe restrictions. For two years, China has claimed to have stamped out the coronavirus with a lockdown + “COVID Zero” policy, but attempts to replicate the measures have resulted in unprecedented disaster for humanity, as lockdowns catastrophically failed to stop the spread.
Also decrying China’s lockdowns is Wall Street Journal columnist James Freeman. A slice:
Two years after prescribing Covid lockdowns, U.S. government disease doctor Anthony Fauci now acknowledges he may never be able to justify the massive societal costs of his radical therapy. But China’s communists, who have acknowledged so very little throughout the Covid era, are still imposing one of the world’s largest experiments in human isolation on the 25 million people of Shanghai. The Journal’s Wenxin Fan reports that one of the world’s most comprehensive lockdowns, in which people have been prevented from dog-walking among myriad other banned activities, will continue past Monday.
David Kirton of Reuters reports that “the city is straining under the demands of the country’s ‘dynamic clearance’ strategy, with some residents complaining of crowded and unsanitary central quarantine centres, as well as difficulties in securing food and medical help.” He adds:
Some have begun to question the policies, asking why COVID-positive children are separated from their parents.
Amy tweets: (HT Jay Bhattacharya)
Once you realise that Zero Covid isn’t a reasoned scientific opinion—but a belief borne of faith—the whole discussion (the venom, the persecution of non believers, the inability to compromise, the fixed, immutable views refractory to evidence) starts to make so much more sense
TANSTAFPFC (There Ain’t No Such Thing As Free Protection From Covid.)
In response to this report, Maud Maron tweets: (HT Jay Bhattacharya)
The hypocrisy is thick on this one @NYCMayor. At today’s press conference you stand in front of signs that say “In NYC you can say whatever you want” & then the NYC law department fires a mom for saying “when will you unmask my toddler?”
Quotation of the Day…
… is from pages 68-69 of the 2003 Liberty Fund collection, edited by Henry C. Clark, Commerce, Culture, and Liberty: Readings on Capitalism Before Adam Smith; specifically, it’s part of an excerpt from Nicholas Barbon’s 1690 tract, A Discourse of Trade (capitalization modernized):
The reasons why many men have not a true idea of trade, is, because they apply their thoughts to particular parts of trade, wherein they are chiefly concerned in interest; and having found out the best rules and laws for forming that particular part, they govern their thoughts by the same notions in forming the great body of trade, and not reflecting on the different rules of proportions betwixt the body and parts, have a very disagreeable conception….
DBx: So, it seems, it has always been, and so it will likely always be.
So very many people commit the fallacy of composition. When, say, the steel worker observes that his job is saved by protective tariffs on steel – or when the steel executive notes that her salary is enhanced by protective tariffs on steel – this person draws the mistaken conclusion that all domestic jobs will be protected, and all domestic wages enhanced, by protective tariffs imposed generally.
But of course logical fallacies, no matter how often committed and swallowed, remain fallacious. A society can no more grow rich through protectionism than it can grow rich through the legalization and widespread practice of armed robbery.
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